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Anthony Trollope uses the characters and drama of his “semi-political” Palliser novels to pursue the ends of Alexis de Tocqueville's political science in a lighthearted yet serious way. Describing himself as an “advanced conservative Liberal,” Trollope claims that his “political theory” is expressed most fully in the Palliser novels. Preoccupied with the phenomenon Tocqueville designates the “democratic revolution,” the novels emphasize the historical “tendency towards equality,” consider its social and political implications, and intimate how traditionally aristocratic England might respond to it. While he endorses the justice of the democratic revolution, Trollope shows that it is accompanied by such disadvantages as a decline in human excellence and greatness. Realistic depictions of character arouse sympathy for his view that by adopting a posture of prudent liberalism toward the advance of equality, the English could both reform their aristocratic institutions and rely on those institutions to mitigate the excesses of democracy.

Near the start of her fascinating new bookThe Lost History of Liberalism, Helena Rosenblatt dryly observes that “available histories of liberalism are seldom helpful” (2). The point is well taken: the historiography of liberalism—largely written as intellectual history—is not particularly coherent, and has only sporadically adopted sound historical methodology. The genre emerged relatively late. The proliferation of the language of liberalism in the nineteenth century, not least in party politics, did not produce theoretically informed historical accounts of particular note. A historiography of liberalism really only developed in response to the perceived “crisis of liberalism” of the early twentieth century. Guido de Ruggiero's 1925The History of European Liberalismwas written in a Hegelian idealist tradition, according to which liberalism was an “organic development of freedom coinciding with the organization of human society and its progressively higher and more spiritual forms.” Coming from a different direction was Harold Laski'sThe Rise of European Liberalism: An Essay in Interpretation,published in 1936. Laski's liberalism was as much a “habit of mind” as a set of doctrines, with a complex history making both “clarity difficult” and “precision unattainable.” An essentialized understanding of liberalism was nevertheless still at work. Laski's liberalism was that the individualist, utilitarian mode of thought necessary to an emerging capitalist society. “The liberal creed, in a word,” he wrote, “is a doctrine woven from the texture of bourgeois need.”

Chapter 5 of Laborde’s incredibly rich analysis engages with the question of religious group rights. Laborde argues that the politically liberal state should grant (some) religious associations legal exemptions and protections, on the basis of their freedom-of-association-related interests: first, their coherence interest in living “by their own standards, purposes and commitments,” and second, their competence interest in being allowed to “interpret their own standards, purposes and commitments” (175). Accordingly, religious associations may be exempt from gender discrimination laws, if compliance would prevent them from acting as their religious doctrine requires them to (189). I offer two critical comments on Laborde’s account. My first concerns her treatment of ontological issues as irrelevant to group rights. The second concerns the scope of rights she is willing to grant religious associations.

Edmundson has written an admirably concise yet powerful book. It blends a critical account of Rawls’ work with an original case for democratic socialism hewn from Rawlsian stone. In my opinion, this case has some flaws but it remains a timely contribution to the enduring quest for justice and social stability.

Perhaps in part because of an issue related to chronology of publications, the connections between Locke's liberalism and philosophical anthropology are underappreciated. This essay addresses that issue and re-examines Locke's account of the person, treating it as an interpretive key to Locke's political thought. Locke'spersonis, contra the standard readings, a relational concept that refers to beings capable of law in terms of their accountability to law; descendants of Adam are equal as persons in that they hold identical rights (or prerogatives) and duties under the divine law. This philosophical anthropology leads to a principle—eschatological accountability delimits legitimate moral and political authority, so authority over a person is necessarily limited by that person's accountability to God—that helps to clarify certain misunderstandings of the status of moral authority within Lockean liberalism and to explain how Locke set the terms of subsequent debates about the limits of political authority.

It is now commonplace to acknowledge Alexis de Tocqueville's support for Algerian colonization. Less well understood, however, is why he also endorsed the French strategy of “total war” in the regency. How was Tocqueville's liberalism linked to the specific shape of violence in Algeria? By situating his Algerian writings in the intersecting intellectual contexts of the 1840s, this essay argues that Tocqueville endorsed total war in Africa because of his passion for glory. Far from an aristocratic anachronism, that passion was the product of contemporary scientific debates over voluntarism in France. It was also shaped by the lingering legacies of revolutionary republicanism and Bonapartism which defined glory in terms of national defense. By tethering modern liberty to this conception of glory, Tocqueville provided resources for rationalizing settlerism's exterminationist violence.

This paper contends that Locke's educational writings are more robust in their commitment to autonomy than recent assessments of Locke as a theorist of “disciplinary liberalism” suggest. While Locke's account of parental power is conflicted, it is mostly compatible with a liberal, child-responsive approach to education. Insofar as Locke develops a pedagogy sensitive to the pupil's temperament and his rights as a child, he articulates a nuanced understanding of autonomy, shown to be a product of the individual's participation in a community of rational beings. Complicating both received understandings of Lockean liberalism as atomistic and newer claims about the dark forces of socialization it unleashes, this paper gleans from Lockean education the potential of a socially embedded subject, who looks both within and without himself to cultivate a posture of considerable critical independence.

Tocqueville's writings on pauperism have gained renewed attention in the last decade. Scholars study hisMemoir on Pauperism(1835) to contextualize his thought in the nineteenth century, to question the extent of his liberalism, or to locate his policy solutions on a spectrum from private charity to state welfare. Yet Tocqueville's response to pauperism must be interpreted in light of “the social question,” or the problem of how to alleviate not only the material ills of poverty, but also the phenomenon of social exclusion that accompanied it. His discussion of the social question, I argue, illuminates his particular theory of rights and their possibilities. His thoughts on the poor laws culminate in a novel theory of the educative potential of property rights. This theory of rights prompts us to revisit his position on extending political rights and on the role of political participation in overcoming class division.

For nearly half a century democratic citizens have been preoccupied with the search for self-respect. Though classical liberalism places this question outside its purview and many commentators see in such a concern evidence of a “thin-skinned” political culture, John Rawls has recently provided serious arguments for the political relevance of self-respect. These arguments, we claim, are deeply indebted to the social and political theory of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose deep albeit underexamined influence on Rawls shows itself both in Rawls's conception of the social problem as well as in his solution to it. Rawls's belief that the provision of self-respect can solve the social problem is uniquely Rousseauan not only because of its emphasis on equality but also because it suggests political life can and must reconcile the conflicts between self and society at a fundamental level.

This article examines Reinhold Niebuhr's contributions both to twentieth-century liberalism and to reflection on liberalism's relationship to political ethics. These contributions are, I argue, twofold. First, Niebuhr's account of moral psychology chastens liberal ambitions and assumptions, offering a more “realistic” liberalism (while avoiding certain weaknesses of “realist” theories). Second, Niebuhr's thought points to the importance of ethos—the combination of dispositions, temperament, and perceptions that shape individual conduct—in defining liberalism and determining the quality of political action. In articulating an ethos of humility, moderation, skepticism, irony, and self-restraint, Niebuhr offers a reformulation and defense of liberalism, and a warning against dangers that threaten liberalism both from within and without.

This paper calls attention to the interpretive, and humanist liberal, strand of thinking that is most clearly evident in the development of Charles Taylor's ideas. Recovering it makes it possible to see why the differences between Taylor and Rawls should be seen, not in terms of the erstwhile disputes between liberals and communitarians, but instead as over issues of method, and in particular about the independence or autonomy of political philosophy. Rawls and Taylor exemplify distinct modes of postanalytic liberal theorizing that emerged in the late twentieth century out of two very different responses to challenges within analytic philosophy's discursive beginnings that continue to divide the discipline to this day. Their juxtaposition, therefore, sheds light on how such methodological commitments animate normative prerogatives and generates important resources for thinking about the very powers and limits of political theory.

This paper aims to illuminate the ongoing significance of Locke's political philosophy. It argues that the legitimacy of political authority lies, according to Locke, in the extent to which it collaborates with individuals so as to allow them to be themselves more effectively, and in its answerability to the consent such individuals should thereby give it. The first section discusses how the free will inevitably asserts its authority; the second shows the inevitability of the will's incorporation of authority as a kind of prosthesis, which in turn transforms the operation of the will; and the third treats the issue of consent, arguing that Locke is less interested in explicit acts of consent than in the norm of consent, in answerability to which structures of authority should be shaped so as to honor the beings whose capacity to consent is definitive for them.

Berlin is often taken to have exaggerated his case against positive liberty, since contrary to what he seems to argue, several versions of it do not logically justify coercion. A more historical interpretation of his warnings may save him from this accusation, yet on the other hand suggests his message is of little relevance for contemporary liberalism. In contrast to both these approaches, this essay considers a third and largely neglected aspect of “Two Concepts of Liberty,” that speaks more directly to the challenges facing liberalism today: Berlin's warning that positive liberty invites the specific kind of coercion that parades as liberation, and that it does so according to a psychologically predictable pattern. After reconstructing this undercurrent in Berlin's critique of positive liberty, this essay also considers the relevance of Berlin's warnings to contemporary European debates on banning the Muslim veil in the name of liberation.

This essay argues that Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity provides a morally robust argument for religious pluralism—one which avoids the pitfalls of relativism and official neutrality by elucidating the need for a civil religion of toleration. The work thus contains Locke's friendly critique of his more radical Enlightenment contemporaries who had openly debunked the Bible. This critique is friendly, I argue, because Locke ultimately agrees with Spinoza and Hobbes about revelation, miracles, and religion's psychological causes. While Locke joined these thinkers in a common project to make Christianity less sacrificial and friendlier to enlightened selfishness, his analysis also reveals the need to retain some of its self-abnegating spirit in liberalism's service. But Locke has difficulty accounting for that spirit itself, and this problem in one of liberalism's original theorists may help explain the dissatisfactions and anxieties troubling tolerant societies today.

Some Thoughts Concerning Educationoffers the theory of governance theTwo Treatiseslack. Education is the key to Lockean politics: self-government and public order require virtuous citizens, and these citizens, as Locke suggested in theEssayand explains in theEducation, are made rather than found, constructed from the ground up by discipline. Through early and careful practices of education, they are enmeshed in a net of habit and custom that naturalizes the moral commitments they are taught, rendering the process, and the artifice, invisible. Locke entangles his subjects in an architecture of power of which they become the bearers, thereby providing the foundation for public order and limited government. Locke's disciplinary liberalism allows us to better appreciate late modern subjectivity as an achievement, rather than a given of political life, albeit an achievement that involves some uncomfortable compromises and a willingness to accept, if not laud, our disciplinary commitments.

I am grateful to both William Galston and George Crowder for their thoughtful responses. In writing the original essay, I had two goals in mind. First, I wanted to give an accurate reading of Isaiah Berlin's philosophy and to challenge certain misconceptions about it. Second, I hoped to use some of Berlin's insights to contribute to the contemporary discussion of value pluralism and its relationship to liberalism. Neither Galston nor Crowder disputes my reading of Berlin. Galston writes that he “never set out to write as an interpreter of Berlin”; Crowder, too, simply brackets the question of interpretation (see his footnote 1). So I will focus these comments strictly on the problem of value pluralism's relationship to political liberalism.

The essay explores the relationship between value pluralism, as Isaiah Berlin understood it, and liberalism. It consists of two main parts. In the first part, I argue that value pluralism does not entail liberalism, and I criticize two philosophers—William Galston and George Crowder—who believe that it does. In the second, I reconstruct and defend Isaiah Berlin's own understanding of this relationship, drawing on an essay that is often neglected by Berlin's interpreters: “John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life.” Berlin thought that the relationship between value pluralism and liberalism was largely psychological. He believed that those who embraced value pluralism would be more likely to affirm liberal institutions, because they would be more likely to exhibit certain virtues—notably empathy, imagination, and openness to other ways of life—that typically motivate tolerance.

John Locke's theory of property has been the subject of sustained contention between two major perspectives: a socioeconomic perspective, which conceives Locke's thought as an expression of the rising bourgeois sensibility and a defense of the nascent capitalist relations, and a theological perspective, which prioritizes his moral worldview grounded in the Christian natural law tradition. This essay argues that a closer analysis of Locke's theory of money in theSecond Treatisecan provide an alternative to this binary. It maintains that the notion of money comprises a conceptual area of indeterminacy in which the theological universals of the natural law and the historical fact of capital accumulation shade into each other. More specifically, the ambiguity of the status of money enables Locke to navigate an antinomy within the natural law such that he establishes a relation ofnecessitybetween the divinetelosand accumulative practices.

In recent years a powerful body of literature has emerged that challenges contemporary liberal thought on a series of related fronts, which can usefully be described as “realist.” This article focuses on the realist criticism of the dominant liberal account of legitimacy and explores the possibility of developing a political theory that can overcome this challenge while remaining distinctively liberal (hence “liberal realism”). Drawing on the work of a wide range of thinkers who fall outside of the standard Rawlsian tradition in contemporary liberal thinking, the article pursues three different directions in which a theory of liberal realism might be developed—negative, minimal, and partisan—and explores the advantages and shortcomings of each. It attempts to further demonstrate the salience and force of the realist challenge to liberal legitimacy and the need for liberalism to develop an adequate response to it, and offers some proposals concerning the appropriate theoretical framework for doing so.

Kant is regarded as one of the staunchest advocates of retributive punishment in the modern tradition. This essay makes the case that a careful reexamination of Kant's account of punishment is necessary, especially in light of liberalism's characteristic inability to give the powerful moral appeal of retribution its due. Kant attempted to provide a clear analysis of what we mean when we say that morality demands that punishment be “proportional” to the crime. According to Kant, punishment's retributive aspect—as distinguished from its deterrent or restorative effects—is primarily concerned with redeeming (negative) moral worth. This paper attempts to unpack this claim by examining Kant's discussions of judicial punishment, the conscience, and divine punishment, respectively. It concludes that as a result of serious unresolved difficulties in his arguments for retribution, Kant manages only to deepen the question of the morality of retribution rather than to give it a decisive answer.

This paper examines problems of the liberal democratic order through an analysis of the political thought of a neglected American thinker, William Graham Sumner. Sumner argues that the liberal order is inextricably linked to laissez-faire, and is under siege from the closely interrelated threats of socialism, plutocracy, imperialism, and the degeneration of democracy. He recognizes that the liberal-democratic capitalist state has significant deficiencies, including atomization, “cold” economic relations, and a loss of “poetry.” It also seems to depend upon values which are not readily propagated by liberalism. But efforts to address deficiencies through government action amount to attempts to intermix philosophically incompatible elements and serve to hasten the system's collapse. Sumner's work unwittingly suggests that the usual “Lockean” liberal model may be so flawed that a revised public philosophy, with new language and paradigms, is needed for the effective pursuit of his goals of freedom, dignity, and human development.

The agonistic critique of liberalism argues that liberal theory unwisely eliminates conflict from the design of liberal-democratic institutions and understandings of liberal citizenship. John Stuart Mill anticipates and resolves the agonistic critique by incorporating several theories of antagonism into his political theory. At the institutional level, Mill places two antagonisms at the center of his political theory: the tension between the popular and bureaucratic elements in representative government, on the one hand, and that between the democratic and aristocratic elements in modern society, on the other. These tensions guarantee the fluidity of the political sphere. At the experiential level, Mill's embrace of antagonism is even more complete, as he argues that even our objectively correct opinions must be ceaselessly contested to become properlyours. The theory that emerges is both agonistic and liberal; further, it calls into question current liberal attitudes concerning conflict and antagonism.

The relationship between pluralism and liberalism has been at the center of recent considerations of Isaiah Berlin's thought. In particular, liberal theorists have asked whether the value pluralism Berlin endorses actually undermines his liberalism. A common interpretive approach resolves this problem by presenting Berlin's pluralism as “limited” rather than “radical,” and therefore capable of serving as a moral foundation authorizing liberalism. I challenge this re-construction of Berlin's work, arguing that such readings are premised on a conception of judgment Berlin does not share. While many of his readers believe that a judgment on behalf of liberalism requires the identification of a transcontextual ground, Berlin invites us to see human judgment as a meaningful practice that occurs in the absence of absolutes yet does not simply mirror local norms. Berlin's defense of liberalism models this kind of judgment—a judgment that is neither mandated, nor ruled out, by pluralism.

The paper examines the efforts of several Jewish thinkers to cope with the discrepancy between the inherently theocratic principles of their religion and the modern, liberal ideas with which they wished to bring Judaism into harmony. It focuses first on Moses Mendelssohn's attempt at the end of the eighteenth century to provide a rationale for the dissolution of Judaism's coercive, collectivist dimension and to render the Jewish religion fully compatible, in practice, with liberalism. The next major focus is the recent work of David Novak, who has sought in different ways to show how one can proceed from traditional Jewish premises to the endorsement of nonliberal political arrangements that nonetheless preserve the best of liberalism's achievements. The final focus is on the Israeli religious thinker Isaiah Leibowitz's widely celebrated but in principle merely provisional relinquishment of the theocratic idea.

While Isaiah Berlin considered himself principally as a political theorist in the liberal tradition, his was an unorthodox liberalism in both method and substance, rooted in the confluence of three traditions—British, Russian, and Jewish. Unlike many liberals, he wrestled with the tension between universalism and particularism, and also between individualism and communalities. He rejected all monistic approaches to morality (including liberal monism) but repudiated as well the moral relativism of much modern thought, espousing instead value pluralism. While we cannot arrive at a universally valid conception of the summum bonum, we can specify the summun malum—the great evils of the human condition. Berlin saw political theory as a branch of moral philosophy but drew political morality from political life rather than imposing it on politics. The range of goods and principles that human beings rightly prize cannot be combined into harmonious wholes in either our individual or collective existence. Some goods exclude others, and we must choose among them.

Most scholars agree that Frederick Douglass was a liberal—he was committed to individual rights, toleration, limited government, and self-reliance. Wilson Carey McWilliams deviated from this view by suggesting that Douglass's experience as a slave led him to appreciate human interdependence and reject liberalism in favor of fraternal communitarianism. In this essay, Douglass's response to the problem of slavery is examined in order to demonstrate that both the liberal and the fraternal readings are correct. Douglass's aims were undoubtedly liberal, but he thought these aims could only be realized in a community of individuals who felt strong obligations to one another. As a statesman, Douglass was confronted with the challenge of convincing free people that they ought to care about those who are enslaved. My aim here is to explore how he met that challenge and with what consequences for how we think about liberal statesmanship.

Political and comprehensive liberals are both pessimistic about finding a satisfactory way to resolve the debate over whether and how to expose students in public schools to religion. An examination of John Tomasi's Liberalism beyond Justice and William Galston's Liberal Pluralism reveals that a central cause of this pessimism is the presumption that an education for autonomy must encourage students to become rational choosers of their beliefs. This essay suggests that it is possible to found an education for autonomy on the more modest goal of ensuring that students have a reasonable ability to exit from their communities when they feel that membership is too painful. An education for exit would involve exposing students at the high school level to alternative religious beliefs to ensure they are aware that it might be possible to lead tolerable lives and achieve salvation outside of their communities of origin.

Locke claims that his moral and political teaching is capable of a fully rational demonstration. It would seem then that Lockean citizens are expected to grasp the rational bases of their regime. But Locke was notoriously vague or incomplete on what the rational demonstration entailed, in matters of theology especially, but in other matters as well. I examine this question in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the Two Treatises of Government, and Some Thoughts Concerning Education, and conclude that Locke did not expect most citizens to grasp the full philosophical demonstration of liberalism, but they would understand a simplified version of it. This, however, risks leaving liberal culture in an unsettled state.

InGod, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke's Political Thought, Jeremy Waldron argues that Locke's defense of human moral equality is inextricably tied to a theological doctrine: “Locke's equality claims are not separable from the theological content that shapes and organizes them.” Moreover, Waldron suspects that this points to a more general truth, namely, that an adequate secular defense of human equality is not possible. He writes, “I actually don't think it is clear that we—now—canshape and defend an adequate conception of basic human equality apart from some religious foundation” (GLE, p. 13). If Waldron's claim of the inseparability of equality and theology in Locke's theory is taken as a claim about what Locke himself thought he was doing, I shall not dispute it, though, as I shall argue below, I do not think that Waldron's argument for this claim is satisfactory. If Waldron's claim is rather about the theory that Locke created, which I take to be a system of propositions whose implications and significance are not necessarily fully known to its author, then I disagree. I think that there is, in Locke's theory, a separable secular defense of moral equality intertwined with the theological defense, but I shall not try to prove that Locke intended this to be a separate defense or even thought (as I do) that it could stand on its own.

Professors Richard Matthews and Colleen Sheehan raise two questions about my essay on James Madison and public opinion:(1) Can Madison be considered a genuine partisan of democracy? (2) Do Madison's writings on public opinion suggest that he believed that the government should try to foster a common opinion among the citizenry?Sheehan and Matthews diametrically disagree. Like Martin Diamond and Lance Banning, Sheehan argues that Madison was a thoroughgoing democrat not only during the 1790s, but even during the years surrounding the formation of the Constitution. According to Matthews, Madison was the quintessential classical liberal and a proponent of “thin” democracy who believed that citizens should participate in politics primarily as voters who select elite men to make decisions for them.